More Rachel Alexandra Stride

First time I closely studied a stride. It's been interesting. Learned a few things. Notice in the first couple of seconds of Rachel's vid, there's Asmussen intently watching at the rail! The speed portion starts at the :47 mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_ZLZudXKMM

Did Rachel's nice stride have anything to do with her success? We'd think a horse with an efficient stride takes less energy getting around the race track, and, doubtful there's many nicer strides than Rachel.

Freeze framing the Rachel vid coming down the stretch, I was surprised how high Rachel's fronts rise off the ground and also the amount of time that all fours are off the ground. The sensation of bounding is a lot more noticeable and visible on the freeze frames.

The rider has the most control over the head and the head bobs. Watch the head bobbing closely! It looks as if, as front legs travel rear ward the head bobs up. As they thrust forward the head bobs down. Makes sense. The head needs to go down to help thrust the front legs rearward and needs to come up to get them going again frontward. I.E. the head is just ahead of the leg movement. That's what I am seeing. Unknown if I am seeing it exactly correctly.

Any lessons in close observation of Rachel's stride? Maybe this is an idea to strive for. Front end comes way up and forward. There's smoothness and steadiness.

The first thing we need to do to get stride is to develop strength. Discussion on this in later posts. Strength is, of course, a continuing process always in a state of flux depending on the exercise. But once you get there and the horse has got strength then maybe we take a vid of our own horse and study that stride in the manner of studying Rachel's stride. Anything the rider can do to improve our horse's stride?

My take was that other than avoiding error in rider technique there's little the rider does to "improve" the natural stride at max speed. However, remember that indeed there's a lot a rider does that affects stride at the slower speeds!

Watching Rachel we might believe--if there were something the rider could do with bit and reins to get that front end of our horse just a tad higher in the Rachel mold, then we might affect the length, height and efficiency of the bound. As I think about it--this is near impossible at max or near max speed for the reason that the head movement is just too fast and powerful. You try to do anything at speed it's more likely you're interfering with the stride than helping it. Hence, Calvin Borel riding style--sitting chilly, hands absolutely motionless, just staying out of the horse's way.

But! At the slower speeds there's much that can be done to affect stride, and hence, how about this? We work to perfect a nice stride at the slow gallop. We go on to get a nice stride at the two min gallop and so on into the slightly faster speeds--:14s e.g., and then, presumably we get the nice stride at speed were our jock has less control.

In any event, whenever I get on a race horse the stride is always on my mind and, even when it's obvious to me that my riding is having little effect, I am always consciously trying to get the nice stride. Consider thus to ask our rider, Mr. Rider what do you see in my horse's stride. Anything to be done to improve it? Pin head response to such Qs always interesting, to be sure.